


Destined and Destroyed

by the_authors_exploits



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU (Comics)
Genre: Angst, Drama, F/M, Gen, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, One-Sided Attraction, Soulmate AU, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-03
Updated: 2016-05-03
Packaged: 2018-06-06 02:02:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6733504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_authors_exploits/pseuds/the_authors_exploits
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes a happily-ever-after isn't meant for you</p>
            </blockquote>





	Destined and Destroyed

The first time Jason brings home his soulmates is not the first time Tim meets them; it’s not the first time anyone in the family has met them. Dick threw a fit when he caught sight of his best friends’ names against his brother’s skin.

They make an interesting trio, Tim thinks, watching three red heads with tempers hotter than molten lava bend over a Scrabble board; Damian inspects his nails, awaiting Roy to set down his word, complains hotly about Kori using off-world words, informs Jason his spelling is atrocious.

Tim tugs his sweater sleeve down and hopes the makeup will stay in place to hide the name on his wrist.

~<>~

Tim is six when his name shows; it’s a shaky etch of ink in his skin, unsure, hesitant, as if the person isn’t quite sure if the letters are right.

His parents aren’t very happy and buy makeup to hide it. “A disgrace,” they’d said, sniffing their noses and shoving the concealer into his hands. “Now go study.”

But Tim doesn’t want to hide his soulmate’s name; who cares if his soulmate couldn’t write appropriately yet? They are probably young, like Tim. But he also knows better than to go against his parents so he pretends to not have a mark, hiding it for socials and smiling dreamily at it in the dark of night.

~<>~

Tim’s wrist burns when he meets the boy’s eyes; they’re sunken, hollow, tired but viciously eyeing the watch on his unmarked wrist and Tim wishes he had more to give the boy.

He unclasps the gold watch, pities when the boy licks his lips in awe, and holds it out for him to take. “You can have it.” He has tons of watches. “I’m sorry I don’t have my wallet with me.” He would withdraw a thousand dollars from his bank account to feed the boy and his family if he could.

Suspicion twists the boy’s eyes; his hair, under the soot of Gotham, is a deep red. “I don’t need a hand out.”

Tim blinks. “I don’t… I didn’t mean it like that. I just…” He has his camera weighing his neck down, but he’s selfish, just a kid, and doesn’t want to give that up. “I want to help.”

The boy must believe him because he takes one step forward, out of the alleyway, into the streetlight; another step, and another, and he snatches the watch from Tim’s hand faster than Tim can recognize, scampering back to his alley. Even in the shadows, Tim can tell his eyes are blown wide in wonder.

“This’ll feed the block for three freaking weeks!” His grin is toothy, infectious, and Tim only gets distracted when Batman’s shadow lurches across rooftops down the street.

“I can bring more next week!” He calls out over his shoulder, waving, running after Batman. “Same alley!”

~<>~

Jason doesn’t stay in one place for very long; Tim learns this early on after his resurrection, when the former Robin is considered a menace and wreaks havoc wherever he goes.

Tim does his best to keep an eye on Jason, but he jumps and leaps and hides. Tim thinks back on a boy in an alleyway who wasn’t there the next week, how he wondered if he was okay, if the kid had starved to death. Too skinny for his own good, too kind-hearted to let his neighbors suffer.

Jason hoards food; Tim learns this early on, shortly after becoming one of Wayne’s wards. He finds a backpack wedged behind a panel in the hallway and Alfred is teary eyed as they lay out boxes of cracks, cans of fruit, a loaf of bread.

“Young Master Jason valued food,” is the choked explanation and Tim doesn’t think it’s untoward to settle a hand on the old man’s shoulder, rubbing gently.

~<>~

“I have two,” Jason says, loudly, and the class reacts in scattered oohss, and distrustful or disgusted glances; but Jason shrugs those off. He gets them already, just for coming from the streets.

Tim hunkers down in his seat in the back of the classroom, tugging at his suit cuff, and Jason raises his own sleeve to reveal one of the largest marks Tim has ever seen. It’s spread, wide and elongated, across Jason’s forearm; the writing is pencil thin but oddly elegant, thin and wispy. It reads _Roy_ , and the twisting cursive across Jason’s neck is hard to decipher so Tim doesn’t try; it makes his head hurt, behind his eyes.

He asks his parents a question; not about their marks. Neither has one, or if they do its small and faded. “What happens to those whose mark is not…reciprocated?”

His mother scoffs. “Then they live a cold and sad life.”

“Tragic,” his father mocks; and then they’re talking about their next trip, reminding Tim to do his homework while they’re gone.

~<>~

He’s always wondered if his parents’ lack of linkage with each other, or with their soulmate, dictated that his life would go this way.

He goes home one day, tired of hearing his classmates chatter about their soulmates in sociology class, and asks if Dick has a mark; he’s shown Barbara’s name across his brother’s hip, wonders if Bruce has one. Does Alfred? He asks Dick the same question he’d asked his parents.

“Do they live alone, forever?”

Pity is what Tim sees, and it doesn’t look right shadowing Dick’s eyes. “N-no, not always; sometimes they find a happy ending. With other mismarked.”

There’s a pause, the ticking of the grandfather clock filling the silence, and then Dick leans forward, cautiously.

“Tim? Do you have a mark?”

He doesn’t show it, and when he asks Bruce if they can pick up concealer during Alfred’s grocery run Bruce doesn’t ask questions.

~<>~

When Bruce Wayne’s wards do anything, the media is all over it; they eat it up and spit it out to the public, chewed and mangled and mostly wrong. Like any other news, like any other piece of information.

But Tim doesn’t think this story is wrong; he doesn’t think anyone would be so cruel as to butcher this into what it is.

Jason Todd looks good in a suit, Tim thinks absently; he doesn’t look at anything but the smirking boy in the picture, small in the corner of the news station. Jason Todd will always be in a suit, is his next thought, and then the muscles in his wrist twist tight. It hurts and he gasps in surprise, in pain, gripping the appendage. He vomits in the toilet, making it just in time to expel his lunch.

His parents aren’t any comfort; they sniff and mutter and tell him to get over it when he shows them the faded mark. He asks if they’ll attend the event; they will not.

Jason Todd is dead.

~<>~

The grave stone is gray; why Tim expected it to be something else is baffling. It’s marble, smooth, and beautiful; it sparkles, it’s cared for, and Tim rubs at his wrist, at the raised skin indicating a scar. It’s a sorrowful juxtaposition between the two.

Tim leaves a bundle of roses on the cold stone and returns to the manor for his homework before Alfred can start worrying.

~<>~

Jason is nearly full grown, standing quite a few inches above Tim’s head, when they meet on the roofs; covered in leather and the smell of gunpowder, Jason is intimidating but Tim isn’t scared.

He’s Robin; he’s strong.

And Jason won’t hurt him.

They stare at each other for a while; Jason assesses the changes made to the Robin outfit, and Tim remembers to breathe. Jason is alive and within arms’ reach, just like before, just like in the alley, ohh if only Tim had known then what he knows now. If only he had done something, everything could be so different.

He almost asks if the Lazarus Pit removes soulmate markings, but he bites his tongue and listens to Jason mock and bait him; he doesn’t nibble at it. He takes a deep breath and feels like his lungs might implode.

“I’m glad you’re back,” he whispers, croaks pitifully, and Jason’s jaw clicks shut; Tim hears it through the helmet.

~<>~

Tim remembers when his marking first scarred; he remembers the emptiness and the fog, the colors disappearing slowly. The desire to do nothing, the absent of interest in his photography, in his school, in his (parents’) dreams… Depression, the school counselor had labeled it, and wrote a prescription for him to see an actual therapist.

He’d never gone; his parents wouldn’t stand it, wouldn’t understand why he should be so bothered by something that never mattered to them. He had hugged himself at night and muffled his sobs into his pillow, his mattress, had bit his comforter to keep from screaming.

Nothing would bring the name back to its inked nature; it was a scar now, a literal scratch in his skin, and, while it started out so very noticeable, it had faded as the years wore on and his soulmate was dead.

~<>~

Jason disappears a lot, but Tim will never get used to the momentary feeling of panic; the momentary thought that he’s dead again, that he’s disappeared for good again, that he won’t come back again.

But he shows up again, on another side of Gotham, in another safe house that Tim triple checks and double protects when Jason’s out or sleeping; safety measures that might possibly be DNA locked, that Tim might occasionally be testing out, but that he knows are reliable and will alert him to any non-Jason being entering the premises.

Tim can’t lose Jason again; he doesn’t think he’ll survive it this time. He can’t imagine waking up one morning to a slice of raised skin across his wrist, indicating the second loss of a soulmate.

~<>~

Kori has two names, spread around her biceps and crawling to her shoulder blades; Roy scratches at his knuckles on his right hand, but Tim doesn't know where the second one is. (He learns later on there isn't a second name, that Roy chose Kori because he loved her. Soulmate or not.)

“Tim, don’t you want to play a game with the others?”

He smiles at Dick, keeps his gaze from the wedding ring; Barbara and him were really made for each other. “Nah, I don’t really want to fight with Damian tonight.”

Dick grins and bounds pass to scoop Damian up, plop him in his lap, and observe the game. Tim watches him; he sees Damian wriggle in irritation, marvels at the casual brush of Roy’s hand to Jason’s shoulder, absorbs the warmth in Kori’s gaze, memorizes Jason’s quirk of a smile—genuine and warm.

Tim thumbs the name on his wrist, a scratchy near pockmarked scar reading out _Jason_ and smiles. It’s a shaky thing, but if Jason is happy then Tim can be too; he’ll learn to be happy, and he’ll marry like his parents.

He’ll marry someone with no name or a thing not reciprocated, and he’ll laugh and cut the wedding cake like it was planned from the start; he’ll lie next to them at night and, yes, he will love them but both will know they weren’t his soulmate.

They weren’t what the universe chose for him, but sometimes the universe is cruel and wants to laugh at their misery.

So he smiles when Jason catches his eye across the room, and that night he cries himself to sleep imagining a different universe where his soulmate loves him.


End file.
